It's time to take the shackles off - From Courtside - Jeff Van Gundy leaves New York Knicks - Brief Article

Basketball Digest, Feb, 2002 by Brett Ballantini

JEFF VAN GUNDY, THAT LITTLE, loveable leg shackle of a coach, resigned as coach of the New York Knicks less than 20 games into the season admist a personnel protest with GM Scott Layden. Pat Riley's Miami Heat jumped out of the box with the worst record in the Eastern Conference.

Unless it's simply a matter of karma kicking the Van Gundys hard (Jeff's brother, Stan, is Riley's top assistant in Miami), something else is at work. And, by and large, that something is good for the NBA.

Van Gundy, by all appearances a good man and coach, had steadfastly refused to play to his team's strengths. This won him a lifelong fan in former Knicks center Patrick Ewing, who even in his earliest New York years played totem-pole offense. When Phil Jackson was rumored to be returning to New York to coach the Knicks, Ewing received the news of the Triangle Offense's imminent arrival as if Jackson were Galileo telling him the world wasn't really flat.

It made sense that Ewing lined up with Van Gundy, because the coach kept food on the big man's table. But New York's more recent woes had created unlikely bedfellows in Latrell Sprewell and Van Gundy. Lithe Latrell was diametrically opposed to Van Gundy's molasses offense, yet allied himself with the coach in opposition to Layden's "collect the 3s" team-building strategy. (Memo to the Knicks: No more swingmen already!)

Van Gundy continued the tradition of his mentor Riley and other coaches--notably Mike Fratello--before him by squeezing the life out of basketball. It's said that Riley brought defense back to the game--his Knicks were "Bad Boys" without the Detroit Pistons' PR campaign. But find a tape of Riley's 1992 playoff performance vs. the Chicago Bulls and let's talk about what defense is and isn't.

While Riley does a much better job of playing to his personnel than Van Gundy (Showtime in L.A. to mugging in New York to, well, a little bit of both in Miami), he's still guilty of dictatorial methods in these player-first days. How it must hurt to have every former Heat player parade through Miami in new, more successful unis, hacking at Riley as if he was so many Jerry Krauses.

The first time I watched a Fratello team I was essentially sitting behind him on the Cleveland Cavailers bench as he hopped up and down to direct every play on offense and defense. I thought I was watching a high school football game. The five Cavs on the court practically would not move on offense without directions fed to them by Fratello. On defense, Fratello would listen for the opposition's play call, then bark out the D to waiting players. This didn't just happen on a couple big plays where the Cavs needed stops, but on every single play: Brevin Knight staring at the sideline, hearing the call and relaying it to Shawn Kemp in the post. No one wants to watch NBA basketball when it's no more exciting than firemen passing water buckets to a blaze.

Watching a Fratello-coached basketball game was like playing your first NBA video game on PlayStation before you've mastered the controls: The crowd titters and cheers, albeit sporadically, but nothing ever really happens. That's not basketball.

I don't want to take a hard-line stance against the old-schoolers. If this reads like an endorsement of a players-first league, here's a few qualifiers. Riley is a sure-fire Hall-of-Famer, and deservedly so. With a couple breaks, maybe Van Gundy gets, couple more shots at the NBA Finals. And heck, even Fratello's Atlanta Hawks teams were exciting to watch, in spite of Mike's best efforts.

But it is a different age in the NBA. The rules changes were a start, but now it's up to the head men to start undercoaching games as opposed to overcoaching them.